


Shell of a Queen

by Walkinthegarden



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Failed Queen, Gen, House Stark, Princess Sansa, Queen Jeyne, Queen in the North, Stark Heir, Unhappy Ending, the north - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-31
Updated: 2015-03-31
Packaged: 2018-03-20 13:46:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3652653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Walkinthegarden/pseuds/Walkinthegarden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jeyne fails as a Queen</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shell of a Queen

She hears their whispers, everywhere she goes. They say she doesn’t belong here. They smile courteously and call her _Your Grace_ , but they never call her Queen. Her own subjects don’t trust her. They hold no love for her.

 

When Robb tells her he needs to make up for his slight against the Freys, she begs him not to go. She laces her fingers into his collar and pleads for him to stay with her. He smiles sweetly and kisses her forehead before leaving. The soldiers left with her turn a blind eye to the tears that track down their face, but she knows they think her weak. They protect her for the sake of their King.

 

The news reaches them quickly. She has no time to mourn her dead husband. She’s whisked away and hidden with her sister sent in her place. The soldiers remain with her, protecting her, but it is only for the child that swells in her belly. By all right, she is still a Queen of the North, but her son will be the King.

 

Her son is born and she knows nothing of how to raise him. The soldiers look to her on what to do but she knows nothing of raising children much less raising a King. Over and over she fails her son, and every night she weeps in her bed.

 

They learn when little Robb is seven years old that his Aunt Sansa has reclaimed the North and declared herself the rightful Queen. It excites Jeyne to have someone of Robb’s family to help her, so she has the soldiers pack up and they leave for Winterfell.

 

Sansa is most pleased upon their arrival, but things don’t go quite as Jeyne had planned. Her husband’s sister says Jeyne is the Queen Regent until her son comes of age. Winterfell is placed in her hands and she has no idea what to do with it.

 

Her failures as a mother soon become far too obvious. Little Robb knows not even the basics of sword fighting, nor does he know any old Valyrian, or even the most basic mathematics. Sansa never says anything, but the look she gives Jeyne is more than enough. The former Queen in the North takes her son from her. She teaches him herself, all the language he needs to know, all the mathematics and his letters. She hires him someone to teach him to fight. Sansa makes a proper King out of him while Jeyne does nothing.

 

As little Robb begins to grow, Jeyne does nothing as he runs to his Aunt Sansa instead of her. She only watches as her husband’s sister becomes the mother her son deserved. The boy prefers Sansa’s sad but loving smile to Jeyne’s unsure grimace. He prefers the woman that loves to hold him and laugh with him to the one that can’t look at him because he looks too much like his father.

 

It is Sansa that sits on Robb’s small council when he is grown and King. It is Sansa to whom he presents his newborn baby. Jeyne becomes a shadow of Winterfell, a Queen in name alone, forgotten. Her son barely considers her at all, preferring the woman that raised him properly. It tears at her heart, ages her by years. She cannot regain what she’s lost. Her son is two tens with a wife and child of his own, he’s spent ten and two of those calling another woman mother.

 

She watches from the shadows, cursing the day she bed Robb Stark. She had loved him, without any doubt, but she was never bred to be Queen, and she certainly wasn’t bred to be the mother of a King. She watches as Sansa sits at the high table with Little Robb’s wife, chatting like old friends, each holding one of _Jeyne’s_ grandchildren. Robb is dancing with his oldest daughter, laughing as he twirls her about the floor. As she turns away from the balcony, she can’t help but let the tears slip down her cheeks. Her grandchildren do not even know her as grandmother, they call to Sansa instead, because she was never meant to be a Queen.

**Author's Note:**

> Jeyne's House signal is a shell.


End file.
